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I ascribe it to FO3 being the 'first' game in the FO series for most people who became recent fans. You generally find when something's new and has an uncanny sense of brilliance to it, you tend to look at it in a manner that glosses over the imperfections. When a sequel arrives that does things better, it's lost that sheen of fantastic newness to it, hence can't really be as good as the first one.

I mean, I'm an example of that, possibly to my detriment: I'd hardly think anyone who played FO1 first considers FO3 to be better; if they did, I'd nod my head and thank them for being one of the contributing factors towards the existence of NMA.

That's the thing though, faetal: I can imagine reasons why someone might prefer Fallout 3, but I can't think of many reasons why it should be a better game than New Vegas. The criteria I can think of are mostly matters of taste (setting, story, characters), and other than bugginess I find it difficult to come up with anything that FO3 does better than NV that isn't done better by other games that might be called RPGs. (Doing a quick Google search to find out what others say about this...)

In terms of game systems, as in, which game plays better depending on your outlook: subjectively, one place where FO3 has it better than NV is the fact that it's a low-stress walkabout where you get high-powered weapons before you can blink, and can cheese through anything the game throws at you by chucking enough ammunition around the landscape. It's a fast-food buffet, essentially, and you can dip in any time. NV and the rest require a certain amount of investment before you can reap the dividends, while FO3's remit is mostly instagratification.

I totally agree that NV is the better game. Hell, for me it's the best game in the series. I wouldn't say that you get high powered guns early. From memory you don't get the good stuff (laser and plasma weapons) until much later on, which is completely in line with FO3.

3 does have the better start to it with the vault, stuff with the father etc, but it all comes down to the individual. The big talking point with 3 was Megaton and your choice in how to deal with the bomb there. I find that that is the 1st topic that comes up when I talk to people about the game, as that for many was where you made your big character RP choice of which direction you wanted to go.

4 on the other hand was just such a massive disappointment for me. You can get a power armor in under a hour, which COMPLETE negates that feeling of having to work hard to get the good stuff which was just such a staple of every single Fallout game prior. It also lacks the morality choices that played such a big part of NV in particular.

In FO3, you get the Fat Man and a bunch of ammo for it pretty early on, along with millions of grenades and frag mines, as well as a metric shitload of small guns and rifles after you're through with a bunch of main quests. You're never exactly struggling to survive, apart from the opening couple hours where you might be stuck with just a 10mm pistol for a while.

I think FO3 got the award because it did 90% of the work and NV just built on that and polished it. Yes, NV is the better game, but FO3 was the more innovative at the time by bringing Fallout into a first person shooty mode. IMHO it also did a surprisingly good job of it too, at least as far as atmosphere and translating the desolate wasteland to 3D.

Yeah, their metric seems to be primarily the total number of hours spent, without anything so much as a quality filter for the side-activities that pad out the length. The western RPGs aren't exempted from that either. 70% of DA:I is cheerless 'collect #number of [item]' which invariably means trawling a map of respawning enemies to kill them and collect the things from their vaporising corpses, or to spam the radar key every few inches of terrain to highlight the things embedded in it.

I can't speak for the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest entries, but I've played Disgaea. You could call it grinding. Though it's in dynamically created levels each time around as you level up your weapons (via going into item worlds to fight monsters, and the more of those levels you get through, the more you level up your weapons), though you also have numerous completely optional side areas that you can get into. Hard as hell, but fun regardless.

I'd query Descent being a 'space game', because, well, you're never actually in space when you're playing it. Aside from that, they got number 1 entirely right as far as I'm concerned. Elite fans might not be too chuffed about that, though.

Last edited by Sulphur; 17th Mar 2016 at 23:57.
Reason: probably for the best best to not accidentally link to #1 in a countdown of 15

Top 10 Mortal Kombat Games added. For me MK 2 is the best of the lot but meh. I can't really speak as MK 3 Ultimate was the last one I've played. Quite tempted to play 9 at some point as I've heard nothing but good things about it.

This pick was manufactured to maximize controversy. By no objective measurement would anyone seriously contend that FO:3 is even the best of the Fallout games, much less "best western rpg of all time." This is just a strait up troll.

1. Hardwar or X3 (ok Hardwar is set on Titan not outer space, but it's my favorite of the Elite-likes so I nudged it in. If it has to be an Elite-like in pure space, then X3 would take its place)
2. Star Ruler (my favorite of the Homeworld-like genre)
3. Little Stars 2 (handheld micro-4x. Gets in only because I play it constantly on my train commute)
4. FTL (you all know it)
5. Space Engine (pure sandbox exploration, each new version gets a little more polished and gamified, and with orbital mechanics added it's just about taken over Orbiter on the pure spacecraft sim front)

Runners up or not exactly what we mean by Space game I guess: Orbiter, Kerbal Space Program, Space Engineers, Lunar Flight, Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Dead Space
Well rated games that don't really do it for me: the Mass Effect series